Whenever anyone tells you that only the big parties or star candidates have a chance of winning a seat in federal parliament, just say 'Cathy McGowan'. Running as a community-backed independent candidate, Cathy won the previously safe Liberal seat of Indi in 2013 and again in 2016 and passed Indi on to another independent in 2019 - a first in Australian history. Cathy tells how thousands of ordinary men and women in north-eastern Victoria got together, organised themselves and made their voices heard in Canberra. An inspiring tale and a primer for other communities looking to create change.
From the maelstrom of the Depression and World War II, from Communist Party membership from the 1930s to the 1950s, and early attachment to feminism and the peace movement, Jean Blackburn emerged as a significant public intellectual. Her life work was connecting education policy to the causes of social equality and opportunity. She worked with Peter Karmel on the most significant government report framing school policy in the twentieth century, the blue-print for the Australian Schools Commission. Blackburn was the architect of the Disadvantaged Schools Program, which revolutionised the way that public and Catholic schools delivered education to families marked by many disadvantages, including poverty. She was an architect of the Girls, School and Society report of 1976. Jean Blackburn possessed a charismatic presence, never more in evidence than as she worked on senior secondary school reform in Victoria in the 1980s. As a feminist Blackburn bridged the generations. She was a fiercely independent, courageous, creative and effective social reformer and public intellectual.
Having set out to seduce her teacher as part of a personal agenda, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl realizes her seductive powers are greater than she realized and leaves the home of her guardian aunt and uncle in order to move in with him. Original.
As the civil war in Sri Lanka drew to its bloody end in 2009 the government of this island nation removed its protection from UN officials and employees, who, along with other international observers, were forced to leave the conflict zone. President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his inner circle wanted, it seemed, a war without witness. The end result was the deliberate slaughter of an estimated 70,000 innocent civilians. However, many survivors, and some who died, were able to capture on camera the horrifying conclusion to the war and the cruel deprivations of the internment camps that followed. Today, through their images and testimony, Rajapaksa stands accused of war crimes. In Sri Lanka’s Secrets experienced journalist Trevor Grant presents the shocking story of the final days of this war, alongside the photographs and eye-witness accounts of many Tamils, including Maravan, a social worker who fled to Australia by boat after being tortured by soldiers seeking his folio of photographs. Grant also details the continuing torture and abuse of Tamils in Sri Lanka, and some national governments’ ongoing support for a regime that has abandoned any pretense of democracy. Foremost among these enthusiastic supporters has been the Government of Australia, cynically preoccupied with ‘stopping the boats’ fleeing Sri Lankan state terror. At any cost.
Bringing the hard-to-quantify aspects of lived experience to analysis, and emphasizing what might be lost in interventions if cultural insights are absent, this book includes case studies from across the Asia and Pacific regions –Bangladesh, Malaysia, New Guinea, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Tuvalu and the Cook Islands. When Culture Impacts Health offers conceptual, methodological and practical insights into understanding and successfully mediating cultural influences to address old and new public health issues including safe water delivery, leprosy, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and body image. It contains useful methodological tools – how to map cultural consensus, measure wealth capital, conduct a cultural economy audit, for example. It provides approaches for discerning between ethnic and racial constructs and for conducting research among indigenous peoples. The book will be indispensible for culture and health researchers in all regions. - Discusses global application of case descriptions - Demonstrates how a cultural approach to health research enriches and informs our understanding of intractable public health problems - Covers methods and measurements applicable to a variety of cultural research approaches as well as actual research results - Case studies include medical anthropology, cultural epidemiology, cultural history and social medicine perspectives
Australian poet and journalist Zora Cross caused a sensation in 1917 with her book Songs of Love and Life. Here was a young woman, who looked like a Sunday school teacher, celebrating sexual passion in a provocative series of sonnets. She was hailed as a genius, and many expected her to endure as a household name alongside Shakespeare and Rossetti. While Cross's fame didn't last, she kept writing through financial hardship, personal tragedies and two world wars, producing a remarkable body of work. Her verse, prose and correspondence with the likes of Ethel Turner, George Robertson (of Angus & Robertson) and Mary Gilmore place Zora Cross among the key personalities of Australia's literary world in the early twentieth century. The Shelf Life of Zora Cross draws on these rich sources to reveal the life of a neglected writer and intriguing person.
Race and the Modern Exotic focuses on three internationally successful 'Australian' performers from the first half of the 20th century who created newly-modern, racially-ambiguous, Australian femininities: Annette Kellerman, Rose Quong, and Merle Oberon. Annette Kellerman was a swimmer, diver, lecturer, and silent-film star. Through her international vaudeville performances and film roles, she played with the quasi-racial identity of a South Sea Islander. Rose Quong was an actor, lecturer, and writer who forged a career in London and New York. She built a career based on her own body through a careful appropriation of Orientalism. Quong's body was the signifier of her Chinese authenticity, the essentialist foundation for her constructed, diasporic, Chinese identity. Merle Oberon was one of the most celebrated film stars of the 1930s and 1940s, first in London and then Hollywood. The official story of Oberon's origins was that she was Tasmanian. However, this was a publicity story concocted at the beginning of her film career to mask her lower-class, Anglo-Indian birth. Despite anxious undercurrents about her exoticism, Australians were thrilled to claim a true Hollywood star as one of their own. Racial thinking was at the core of white Australian culture. Far from being oblivious to racial hierarchies and constructions, Australians engaged with them on an everyday basis. Around the world, 'Australian' stars represented a white-settler nation, a culture in which white privilege was entrenched during a period replete with legal forms of discrimination based on race. The complex meanings attached to three successful 'Australian' performers in this period of highly-articulated racism has thus become a popular cultural archive that can be investigated to learn more about contemporary connections between race, exoticism, and gender on the global stage and screen. *** ...these biographies are immaculately researched, stand as exemplary models of biography in context, and complicate existing understandings about race, gender, and popular culture. And best of all, the style is engaging and highly readable - I couldn't put the book down. - Richard Waterhouse, Biography Journal, Vol. 35, Issue 2, Spring 2012Ã?Â?Ã?Â?
Australia is a wealthy nation with the economic profile of a developing country – heavy on raw materials, and low on innovation and skilled manufacturing. Once we rode on the sheep’s back for our overseas trade; today we rely on cartloads of coal and tankers of LNG. So must we double down on fossil fuels, now that COVID-19 has halted the flow of international students and tourists? Or is there a better way forward, which supports renewable energy and local manufacturing? Judith Brett traces the unusual history of Australia’s economy and the “resource curse” that has shaped our politics. She shows how the mining industry learnt to run fear campaigns, and how the Coalition became dominated by fossil-fuel interests to the exclusion of other voices. In this insightful essay about leadership, vision and history, she looks at the costs of Australia’s coal addiction and asks, where will we be if the world stops buying it? “Faced with the crisis of a global pandemic, for the first time in more than a decade Australia has had evidence-based, bipartisan policy-making. Politicians have listened to the scientists and ... put ideology and the protection of vested interests aside and behaved like adults. Can they do the same to commit to fast and effective action to try to save our children’s and grandchildren’s future, to prevent the catastrophic fires and heatwaves the scientists predict, the species extinction and the famines?” —Judith Brett, The Coal Curse
The students of Mount Mayhem School are fed up. Their uniform is hideous, the tuckshop is full of health food, while the sports cupboard is empty. It's time for an election to find a student who will speak on everyone's behalf and make some changes. But who will it be? There's more to voting than you think. Vote for Me will show you how preferential voting works (and you'll know more about it than the average adult in Australia).
